Wishlist/Unlikely

From Openmoko

These are ideas that are unlikely to be implemented in the neo1973. Some are impossible for any device,
some may be possible if technology improves in the future, when patents expire, or in othere models.

Power Sources

V12 Embedded power source

We'll need something beefy to power the next Neos for the above gadgets, I propose the use of a Embeddable Power Source, that with some miniturisation and a bit of design work should be workable as a possible solution.

Flux Capacitor

Power over WiFi

Using PoWiFi openmoko-devices could be powered by your pc-wifi-card or wifi-router.
Charge your mobile at every wlan-ap with no plug-in required.

Another implementation might be power-over-bluetooth.

Miscellaneous

Disinfection UV-Light

I had read about it in an Article on http://www.americanairandwater.com/UV-news/. But Motorola patents it.
Yes - finally a way to stop the billions of annual deaths due to cellphone infections! --Speedevil 14:04, 16 February 2007 (CET)
It´s just something that flying in my head... It´s not the first "unreal" or "useless" idea. Just for fun! --MookiE 14:51, 16 February 2007 (CET)

More seriously - UV of the required frequency is inherently eye-damaging.
Also, as I understand it, there are actually no UV LEDs that will reliably produce 'germicidal' UV.
The most expensive - and they are very expensive - ones produce UV of a sort that may kill very susceptible bacteria, but comparatively few.
IIRC the LEDs are $20 per.
--Speedevil 15:11, 16 February 2007 (CET)

The most efficient germicidal wavelength is at around 260 nm. LEDs at these wavelengths are already available for purchasing, e.g. here: http://www.s-et.com/products.htm - however the cost at this moment is rather high (above $200 per piece; much less in large amounts). The output power is also quite low. However this is likely to improve with time.
--Shaddack 00:54, 16 July 2007 (CEST)

FPGA add-on board

Expose the system bus signals to allow easy-ish addition of a daughter board with an FPGA chip. This will allow to leverage a set of projects available at e.g. http://www.opencores.org/ and easily add a wide range of functionality, from high-speed memory-mapped analog inputs (e.g. GNU-Radio, camera (possibly with a hardware MPEG encoder in the FPGA), portable oscilloscope or logic analyzer or multichannel data acquisition unit), to outputs (eg. display drivers for e-paper, framebuffers for TV-out or external monitors - important for e.g. wearable augmented-reality displays), Ethernet controller, mini-PCI card controller, advanced signal processing, cryptographic accelerators, and essentially anything within the limits of the available number of gates in the FPGA chip and available amount of electricity to feed the chip.

This is very unlikely - for several reasons.

Requires a large, relatively expensive connector, able to pass signals at very high speeds.

Requires routing from the core logic of the phone to the connector, which makes the PCB more complicated to fabricate.

It is not impossible on very different hardware, but will certainly not appear on a commodity phone.

Let's consider another way then. What we want here is not necessarily a direct access to the system bus (not seeing the schematics I mistakenly assumed it would be the simplest way) but any kind of high-speed I/O. E.g. MMC card interface in 8 bit mode at 52 MHz seems to be able to achieve data transfer rate of 52 MB/s, CompactFlash maximum data transfer rate can reportedly go up to 133 MB/s (if I read the standards correctly) - more than enough for most applications listed above. Possible?
--Shaddack 00:54, 16 July 2007 (CEST)

Teleportation

Implementing a beaming-device to the Neo would make it the first phone enabling teleportation.
See: [1]
Possible implementation difficulties might be the lacking teleportation-support in the GSM standard as well as uncooperative mobile service providers that feel uneasy towards innovative technologies...

(Please get serious. You would obviously need more bandwidth to make this practical. Wifi would be better or at least 3G. maybe you could use Bluetooth with the right compression algorithms.)

All band compatibility

Is it possible to make the phone so it can work on any cell network including the Veriz** network in the USA. Unfortunately, the FCC has allowed network providers to have proprietary phones etc... The way the US system works tends to cheapen the phone itself because there is more money in the selling of service, this tends to foster semi-disposable phones. Don't loose focus, you are in business to make money selling phones, make really good solid phones and they will be appreciated. My ideal is to be able to go purchase a phone, purchase a service separately, and be able to change services when necessary.

Unfortunately, this would add significant cost, volume, and weight. And be useless for the majority of worldwide users. In some carriers cases, you simply can't do this anyway, as they won't supply information on their networks, or let you connect to them with your own handset. Different phones for different markets is probably the way to go. Hopefully eventually the carriers will bring out OpenMoko phones.

Allows connection to new types of networks with only a software upgrade

Disadvantages

Experimental?

Only one type of wireless network would be accessible at any given time

Solution: Include 2 SDR radios (this would alleviate radio contention)

All protocols would need to be coded in software

Solution: Upgrade primary cpu if necessary (additional power costs for a faster cpu are far outweighed by reduction of radios)

Unfortunately, much of this is incorrect.
A wideband software radio eats _enormous_ amounts of power in very fast A/Ds and D/As, as well as fast CPUs.
It's also much more expensive in many cases, due to the large amount of CPU power needed, and the expensive chips and wideband RF devices needed.
It trades flexibility for hardware signal processing.

One little filter chip can do billions of operations per second, entirely due to the physics.

Also - there is no open-source GSM stack, and this would in fact be illegal to sell in many countries.
--Speedevil 20:43, 9 July 2007 (CEST)

Beverage Aids

Beer Cooling

Either Rod's filled with liquid nitrogen pop out the bottom or heatpipes attached to a peltier device. for those hot days when your cold one is just a one.

Hardware enhancements

Some small hardware enhancement could be cheap, but very useful. Please add your ideas/wishes here:

Made Hardware Extension/Expansion for the Base Product
Market this device like a fully customizable PC;
- create a base device, (which you already did)
- add wifi and bluetooth(absolutely neccesary for any mobile device)
- make expansion hardware, that user can connect to the base hardware, (e.g camera & hdd; gamepad...etc)
- just like a PC the user will choose customizations that sue their needs.
- most important, the expansion hardware should NOT be a peripheral that has ridiculously long cables, it should fit snuggly to the device making it a little thicker than the base device.
- This mobile entertainment generation wants an all-in-one device. They want their cellphone, mp3 player, pda, digital camera(which takes good quality and sized pictures), video player to all fit in their pocket.
- That's why the ipod's hot, but that is why this is hotter, the user can get all those things and upload software to make it better it even better to their personalities.

If the hardware is made as customizable as the software, everyone will have one of these device, from the smallest child to a CEO of a corporation, because it can be made exactly to what the user wants. Market the expansion hardware, no-one will mind paying for the parts as they need them, but they will be very upset about not being able to do want they really want to do with it. No one will even think about looking at other devices. If the "regular joe/jill" has to buy a new part instead of a whole new device, which do you think he/she will choose?

- Modular, able to open and upgrade/add hardware while keeping a micro form factor.

The neo1973 is a phone, to be marketed as a phone. Future devices may be marketed in other ways. The shape and number of buttons is fixed for this device. Minor modifications may happen before it ships in September.

See Expansion Back for expansion thoughts. Extendable devices otherwise simply aren't really possible, unless you make the phone larger than needed.

The connectors take up volume, add unreliability, need mechanical fixings, and modules have to be larger than required to allow slight increases in size. --Speedevil 14:47, 17 April 2007 (CEST)

Views

Personal tools

These are ideas that are unlikely to be implemented in the neo1973. Some are impossible for any device,
some may be possible if technology improves in the future, when patents expire, or in othere models.

Storage Devices / Peripherals

Floppy Disk Drive

For people stuck in the past who just can't let go of that last 3 and a half inches.

At least the initial devices will be phones. In a phone this is a bad idea.
There may be future devices that it would be appropriate in.

LASER keyboard (can be a full QWERTY keyboard)

On the hardware side, this would require a $5 laser diode, a $3 (in bulk) custom diffraction grating, and probably a couple of cubic centimetres volume inside the phone.

This requires a camera pointable to the front.

It requires an integrated stand for the phone.

To practically use this, you've got to be 40cm or so away from the phone, which means under 25*20 of text resolution.

In software, it's relatively easy to parse the camera output, to find changes in the known laser field.

Power Sources

V12 Embedded power source

We'll need something beefy to power the next Neos for the above gadgets, I propose the use of a Embeddable Power Source, that with some miniturisation and a bit of design work should be workable as a possible solution.

Flux Capacitor

Power over WiFi

Using PoWiFi openmoko-devices could be powered by your pc-wifi-card or wifi-router.
Charge your mobile at every wlan-ap with no plug-in required.

Another implementation might be power-over-bluetooth.

Miscellaneous

Disinfection UV-Light

I had read about it in an Article on http://www.americanairandwater.com/UV-news/. But Motorola patents it.
Yes - finally a way to stop the billions of annual deaths due to cellphone infections! --Speedevil 14:04, 16 February 2007 (CET)
It´s just something that flying in my head... It´s not the first "unreal" or "useless" idea. Just for fun! --MookiE 14:51, 16 February 2007 (CET)

More seriously - UV of the required frequency is inherently eye-damaging.
Also, as I understand it, there are actually no UV LEDs that will reliably produce 'germicidal' UV.
The most expensive - and they are very expensive - ones produce UV of a sort that may kill very susceptible bacteria, but comparatively few.
IIRC the LEDs are $20 per.
--Speedevil 15:11, 16 February 2007 (CET)

The most efficient germicidal wavelength is at around 260 nm. LEDs at these wavelengths are already available for purchasing, e.g. here: http://www.s-et.com/products.htm - however the cost at this moment is rather high (above $200 per piece; much less in large amounts). The output power is also quite low. However this is likely to improve with time.
--Shaddack 00:54, 16 July 2007 (CEST)

FPGA add-on board

Expose the system bus signals to allow easy-ish addition of a daughter board with an FPGA chip. This will allow to leverage a set of projects available at e.g. http://www.opencores.org/ and easily add a wide range of functionality, from high-speed memory-mapped analog inputs (e.g. GNU-Radio, camera (possibly with a hardware MPEG encoder in the FPGA), portable oscilloscope or logic analyzer or multichannel data acquisition unit), to outputs (eg. display drivers for e-paper, framebuffers for TV-out or external monitors - important for e.g. wearable augmented-reality displays), Ethernet controller, mini-PCI card controller, advanced signal processing, cryptographic accelerators, and essentially anything within the limits of the available number of gates in the FPGA chip and available amount of electricity to feed the chip.

This is very unlikely - for several reasons.

Requires a large, relatively expensive connector, able to pass signals at very high speeds.

Requires routing from the core logic of the phone to the connector, which makes the PCB more complicated to fabricate.

It is not impossible on very different hardware, but will certainly not appear on a commodity phone.

Let's consider another way then. What we want here is not necessarily a direct access to the system bus (not seeing the schematics I mistakenly assumed it would be the simplest way) but any kind of high-speed I/O. E.g. MMC card interface in 8 bit mode at 52 MHz seems to be able to achieve data transfer rate of 52 MB/s, CompactFlash maximum data transfer rate can reportedly go up to 133 MB/s (if I read the standards correctly) - more than enough for most applications listed above. Possible?
--Shaddack 00:54, 16 July 2007 (CEST)

Teleportation

Implementing a beaming-device to the Neo would make it the first phone enabling teleportation.
See: [1]
Possible implementation difficulties might be the lacking teleportation-support in the GSM standard as well as uncooperative mobile service providers that feel uneasy towards innovative technologies...

(Please get serious. You would obviously need more bandwidth to make this practical. Wifi would be better or at least 3G. maybe you could use Bluetooth with the right compression algorithms.)

All band compatibility

Is it possible to make the phone so it can work on any cell network including the Veriz** network in the USA. Unfortunately, the FCC has allowed network providers to have proprietary phones etc... The way the US system works tends to cheapen the phone itself because there is more money in the selling of service, this tends to foster semi-disposable phones. Don't loose focus, you are in business to make money selling phones, make really good solid phones and they will be appreciated. My ideal is to be able to go purchase a phone, purchase a service separately, and be able to change services when necessary.

Unfortunately, this would add significant cost, volume, and weight. And be useless for the majority of worldwide users. In some carriers cases, you simply can't do this anyway, as they won't supply information on their networks, or let you connect to them with your own handset. Different phones for different markets is probably the way to go. Hopefully eventually the carriers will bring out OpenMoko phones.

Allows connection to new types of networks with only a software upgrade

Disadvantages

Experimental?

Only one type of wireless network would be accessible at any given time

Solution: Include 2 SDR radios (this would alleviate radio contention)

All protocols would need to be coded in software

Solution: Upgrade primary cpu if necessary (additional power costs for a faster cpu are far outweighed by reduction of radios)

Unfortunately, much of this is incorrect.
A wideband software radio eats _enormous_ amounts of power in very fast A/Ds and D/As, as well as fast CPUs.
It's also much more expensive in many cases, due to the large amount of CPU power needed, and the expensive chips and wideband RF devices needed.
It trades flexibility for hardware signal processing.

One little filter chip can do billions of operations per second, entirely due to the physics.

Also - there is no open-source GSM stack, and this would in fact be illegal to sell in many countries.
--Speedevil 20:43, 9 July 2007 (CEST)

Beverage Aids

Beer Cooling

Either Rod's filled with liquid nitrogen pop out the bottom or heatpipes attached to a peltier device. for those hot days when your cold one is just a one.

Hardware enhancements

Some small hardware enhancement could be cheap, but very useful. Please add your ideas/wishes here:

Made Hardware Extension/Expansion for the Base Product
Market this device like a fully customizable PC;
- create a base device, (which you already did)
- add wifi and bluetooth(absolutely neccesary for any mobile device)
- make expansion hardware, that user can connect to the base hardware, (e.g camera & hdd; gamepad...etc)
- just like a PC the user will choose customizations that sue their needs.
- most important, the expansion hardware should NOT be a peripheral that has ridiculously long cables, it should fit snuggly to the device making it a little thicker than the base device.
- This mobile entertainment generation wants an all-in-one device. They want their cellphone, mp3 player, pda, digital camera(which takes good quality and sized pictures), video player to all fit in their pocket.
- That's why the ipod's hot, but that is why this is hotter, the user can get all those things and upload software to make it better it even better to their personalities.

If the hardware is made as customizable as the software, everyone will have one of these device, from the smallest child to a CEO of a corporation, because it can be made exactly to what the user wants. Market the expansion hardware, no-one will mind paying for the parts as they need them, but they will be very upset about not being able to do want they really want to do with it. No one will even think about looking at other devices. If the "regular joe/jill" has to buy a new part instead of a whole new device, which do you think he/she will choose?

- Modular, able to open and upgrade/add hardware while keeping a micro form factor.

The neo1973 is a phone, to be marketed as a phone. Future devices may be marketed in other ways. The shape and number of buttons is fixed for this device. Minor modifications may happen before it ships in September.

See Expansion Back for expansion thoughts. Extendable devices otherwise simply aren't really possible, unless you make the phone larger than needed.

The connectors take up volume, add unreliability, need mechanical fixings, and modules have to be larger than required to allow slight increases in size. --Speedevil 14:47, 17 April 2007 (CEST)